- Joined
- Jul 30, 2013
Check out Shakespeare over here embiggening the conversation by making up cromulent new words.
What's the appeal of WoW & MMORPGs in general?
- Thread starter Rand /pol/
- Start date
Check out Shakespeare over here embiggening the conversation by making up cromulent new words.
- Joined
- May 25, 2013
I started playing WoW because weird work schedules means you never get to do tabletop. It was a nice substitute for a break-shit-and-giggle dungeon crawl and I knew a couple of people irl who played so it meant we could do shit together sometimes.
Eventually I had a job for a while that was "sit there and listen for errors to fix" so WoW worked really great since it mostly didn't use the language centers of the brain and I could keep myself occupied and not drift off from listening. Light job I could do LFR during, heavy job I'd farm xmog soloing old content.
Eventually I had a job for a while that was "sit there and listen for errors to fix" so WoW worked really great since it mostly didn't use the language centers of the brain and I could keep myself occupied and not drift off from listening. Light job I could do LFR during, heavy job I'd farm xmog soloing old content.
- Joined
- Dec 10, 2018
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Check out Shakespeare over here embiggening the conversation by making up cromulent new words.
Hey man if Shakespeare can invent words and be called a genius then why can't I?
- Joined
- Feb 4, 2019
Orkeosaurus
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jul 18, 2016
The appeal is that there's nothing like scheduled raiding/mythic dungeons in any other game outside of the genre. It's a nice feeling being able to contribute to the guild's success in runs, but there's also some stress with it. The guild dynamic is kind of like that with coworkers. You can joke around, but you're probably not going to go out for drinks later. But this is still better than literally never having to talk to anyone to get shit done in most other multiplayer games.
- Joined
- Nov 17, 2018
I used to play wow and it used to be a lot more social and had pretty good world building before they fucked it up. Then cataclysm came out and they burned down my favorite forest so i got salty and quit
- Joined
- Jun 12, 2018
I hate to say "the sense of accomplishment", because everyone with half a brain knows that playing a video game doesn't equate to accomplishing jack shit, but for me and a lot of my friends, that was the main draw. The game would always give us something to work towards, and we delighted in putting in the grind every day to get a little bit closer to the shiny horse or armor set or whatever.
The really sinister thing about MMOs, however, is how they overshadow everything else that you used to enjoy doing. The genre is not designed to reward short intervals of playtime; everything is on such a grandiose scale that you don't feel like you've really played unless you put in a lot of hours every day. Before you know it, you find yourself reflexively opening your MMO of choice as soon as the computer boots, and touching nothing else, save for something like background music. The game then stays open until you finally pry yourself away to do something more important, usually work or sleep. Worse still, when you run out of interesting things to do, you just brainlessly do the unfun shit because at least you're doing something. When you finally run out of objectives on one character, you just start a new one and begin the whole thing again.
Others in this thread have mentioned the social aspect, which does exist. However, in my experience, eventually my friends' conversations devolved entirely into WoW shit. We would seldom bring up something unrelated, but for the most part, it was shit about the game, followed by varied periods of silence. Any time a new person entered our circle and/or guild, we would shoot the shit with them at first, but eventually the curiosity wore off and we were back to talking about the same mundane game-related things. My friends and I stopped meeting IRL as often, and when we did meet up, the conversation would be about the game, like we hadn't even left our houses.
I can't say for sure whether I was ever addicted, because I never felt any kind of withdrawal symptoms when I decided to stop playing for whatever reason, but I definitely noticed how much of my time I had been putting in, and how much more time I seemed to have for other things when I stopped.
TL;DR: A lot of nerds play MMOs because they make you work for something long enough that by the time you get it, you feel some contrived sense of accomplishment.
The really sinister thing about MMOs, however, is how they overshadow everything else that you used to enjoy doing. The genre is not designed to reward short intervals of playtime; everything is on such a grandiose scale that you don't feel like you've really played unless you put in a lot of hours every day. Before you know it, you find yourself reflexively opening your MMO of choice as soon as the computer boots, and touching nothing else, save for something like background music. The game then stays open until you finally pry yourself away to do something more important, usually work or sleep. Worse still, when you run out of interesting things to do, you just brainlessly do the unfun shit because at least you're doing something. When you finally run out of objectives on one character, you just start a new one and begin the whole thing again.
Others in this thread have mentioned the social aspect, which does exist. However, in my experience, eventually my friends' conversations devolved entirely into WoW shit. We would seldom bring up something unrelated, but for the most part, it was shit about the game, followed by varied periods of silence. Any time a new person entered our circle and/or guild, we would shoot the shit with them at first, but eventually the curiosity wore off and we were back to talking about the same mundane game-related things. My friends and I stopped meeting IRL as often, and when we did meet up, the conversation would be about the game, like we hadn't even left our houses.
I can't say for sure whether I was ever addicted, because I never felt any kind of withdrawal symptoms when I decided to stop playing for whatever reason, but I definitely noticed how much of my time I had been putting in, and how much more time I seemed to have for other things when I stopped.
TL;DR: A lot of nerds play MMOs because they make you work for something long enough that by the time you get it, you feel some contrived sense of accomplishment.